by Paul Collins
“You pity me!” Webster blurted out. “You are sorry for me? What for?”
“To see you so excited. I hope you will be calmer.”
“Oh!” Webster said distantly. “That’s it.”
The rest of the ride passed without a word. Back at his jail cell, the men bolstered Webster’s head with pillows and placed a lantern nearby so that they could peek in, though there was little to see or hear beside his groans. One o’clock passed, and the doctor lay seemingly inert; an hour later, and he still had not moved an inch.
The contents of his pockets, though, were providing considerably more lively viewing. Inside his wallet were three scraps of paper. The first simply had a single number scrawled on it in pencil: $483,64. But unfolding the next scrap revealed two columns dense with notes in the same crabbed hand:
Nov. 9 Friday, rec’d
$510,00
234,10 out Dr. Big
Pettee cash—$275, 90
Dr. P came to lecture-room, front left-hand seat,—students stopped—he waited till gone, and came to me and asked for money—Desired for him to wait till Friday 23d, as all the tickets were not paid for, but no doubt wd be then,—he, good deal excited—went away—said I owed him $483,64.
Friday 23d, called at his house about 9 A.M., told him I had the money, and if he wd call soon after one, wd pay him—He called at 1/2 past, and I paid him, $483,64 cts.
A second column rehearsed the same explanation, but now with a startling difference: a mention of another mortgage, this one for $2,432, a sum larger than Webster’s yearly pay at Harvard, and an unusual type of loan and amount for a renter. Dr. Webster, it seemed, had been getting very deeply into debt.
9th Due Dr. P, who called at lecture $483,64, by his act.—Desired him to wait until Friday 23d—Angry.
Friday, 1/2 1, pd him; he to clear mortgage.
Notes, Feb 13, 1847 including smaller one, $2432. $125 due him on loan, which the large note covers, he agreed to give up tow’d’s sale of Min’ls.
Bal due, 483,64—paid, and he gave me two notes—had paid the mortgage, but said he wd go and cancel it. Had paid him 325 by Smith
125 due
500 the loan
Rest from other persons.
Who the other persons were the note did not say, but that meant that nearly $1,500 needed by Webster to pay Parkman would have had to come from those vaguely listed “other persons.” And what of that unexplained notation of “sale of Min’ls”?
A third scrap revealed a simple list of words:
ale
jug mol’s
keys
Tin box
Paint
Solder
It appeared to be a shopping list, the sort written out so carelessly that it would be difficult for anyone else to decipher. And that, indeed, was the problem: the middle letter of “ale” was nearly unreadable. In fact, viewed from another angle, it might spell a different word altogether.
Axe.
15
OLD GRIMES IS DEAD
WHEN MRS. WEBSTER OPENED HER FRONT DOOR EARLY ON Saturday morning, it was not to find her husband arriving back home.
May we come in? Detective Clapp asked.
It had been scarcely twelve hours since Clapp’s last visit, alone, waiting as Dr. Webster pulled on his shoes. This time he had returned in the company of Mrs. Webster’s in-law Charles Cunningham, as well as a local policeman. They hadn’t brought the doctor with them; what they had brought was a document bearing the freshly inked signature of the Cambridge town judge.
We have a search warrant.
The doctor’s bewildered wife ushered them in. Cunningham’s purpose there was to reassure Harriet and her daughters—“I thought it would be a disagreeable business to go alone,” Detective Clapp would later confide—but, like so many others, Cunningham was both family and a creditor. And it was financial papers, or perhaps something worse, that he and Clapp were looking for. Mrs. Webster and her daughters could be of no help: for all the little economies necessitated by their father’s spending, they did not understand the state of his accounts. Just the morning before, they’d sent out invitations around the neighborhood for a grand party.
Clapp and Cunningham quickly focused on Dr. Webster’s study, the usual home of his disordered finances. A trunk of papers revealed nothing more than the ordinary accounts of a working Harvard professor. Along with the expected correspondence, and stores of pens, ink, and stationery, a search in a desk drawer produced a checkbook for the Charles River Bank, showing a balance of $136. That couldn’t be altogether correct: the scraps in the doctor’s own pockets had revealed thousands in debt. Cunningham himself had given money to the Websters, and yet of those transactions there was no sign. The documentation had to be hidden somewhere. Surrounded by the doctor’s fine library—surely the cause of at least some of that debt—the men puzzled over the absence of his papers.
The books! They rifled through the rows, pulling out the volumes of geology, chemistry, and poetry, flapping open their pages, examining the shelving behind them. Nothing.
By now the Charles River Bank would be open; maybe there they’d find some answers in its ledgers, handled with the usual discretion one would expect of Harvard’s local bank. But even as Clapp stepped down from the Websters’ porch, word was spreading among the watchful neighbors of Cambridge. Just up the street, Mayor Willard’s son walked in with the morning news from Boston and handed a newspaper to his father.
Most papers still didn’t have the news, and even the scrappy editors of the eight A.M. Boston Herald had barely had time to include a single paragraph on its front page.
STRANGE RUMOR. There is a strange rumor afloat this morning, that the body of Dr. George Parkman had been found at the Massachusetts Medical Hospital, and that Professor Webster has been arrested and committed to Leverett Street Jail, in connection with his death—all of which is too horrible to command belief.
The Daily Bee had a better scoop in its morning paper:
DISCOVERY OF THE BODY OF
DR. PARKMAN
Under the floor of the Massachusetts
Medical College in North Grove St.
Arrest of Prof. John W. Webster
In scarcely a hundred hurriedly written words, it was all there: the locked laboratory, Littlefield’s discovery in the vault, the arrest. Mayor Willard read the morning newspaper in disbelief. How could the Boston papers print something so outlandish, so patently untrue?
“This is atrocious,” the mayor scoffed.
“No, sir, this is true,” his son shot back. The younger Willard had been speaking just that morning with County Attorney Parker. “And when you have read the evidence, you will think it was deliberate.”
Yet the charge was impossible to countenance. Like any respectable citizen in Cambridge, Mayor Willard was tied to both the school and to the Websters himself: his own father had once been the president of Harvard, and before semiretiring to become the mayor, Willard had been a professor of Oriental languages at the school. Webster had been his colleague for decades, and what these papers were claiming was simply inconceivable.
“I always knew Dr. Webster to be a very frivolous man,” the old mayor insisted, “but I never thought he was a wicked one.”
FROM DEEP inside Dr. Webster’s lab, there came a bloodcurdling cry.
Agghhhh! the policeman shrieked.
Silence.
Agghhhh! he shrieked again.
Eventually one of Officer Fuller’s fellow policemen sauntered back down into the lab, not particularly alarmed. Then the two men traded places, with Fuller going upstairs to the second-floor lecture hall, where Dr. Holmes had taught on the day of the murder, amid the skeletons and phrenology busts. Fuller waited dutifully in dead silence; then he went back down to the lab again. His partner had been screaming, too; neither of them had been able to hear the other from two stories away.
So that answered one question. You could stand in Webster’s lab screaming b
loody murder—and committing it—and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who’d been lecturing to his students two floors above at the time of Parkman’s disappearance, wouldn’t hear a thing.
The lab had begun filling with officers and officials at eight-thirty that morning, and more discoveries were surfacing in the cold light of a December day. Almost the moment Coroner Pratt arrived, he lifted out the grate from the lab’s furnace, and human teeth spilled out from between the gridirons; among the ashes were hard little bone chips, but shattered and scorched like tiny shells in black sand. In the upper laboratory, they found an earthenware plate with dried black ink, and under a table, a small pine stick with ink-stained cotton wadding on the end: the implement, perhaps, for the crude handwriting of the previous day’s letter sending the police to the newly departed schooner Herculean.
Back in the lower lab, Fuller eyed a wooden box in a supply closet. It was a plain tea chest, a handy sort of crate sold at the docks down the street, just the thing for storing a professor’s spare lab apparatus and samples. Officer Fuller lifted up the lid; this one had chunks of minerals inside, part of Webster’s geological collections of chiastolite, spodumene, green feldspar, and the like. The doctor had cushioned his rock samples in a bed of tanning bark, probably from a sack of the stuff he kept nearby. Fuller idly ran his hand down into the bark; there was another layer of mineral samples underneath. Then he thrust his hand farther down into the crate.
There was something else down there. His fingers sank into another object, softer than the rest—it was wet, and cold. He looked about for the officer who had spent the night in the room.
“Starkweather!” he yelled in alarm.
Officers clambered back down the stairs from the upper lab, with Parkman’s agent Kingsley accompanying them. They found Fuller pointing at the crate.
“There’s something more in there than minerals,” he said.
Fuller dragged the box out of the closet and into the middle of the room, its lid removed. Then, as the assembled officers watched, he lifted it up and roughly turned it onto its side. The contents cascaded out onto the floor, and a squarish, sodden shape thudded heavily onto the boards. Bark and minerals trickled out of the chest and onto it, and, from the bottom of the chest, a jackknife came clattering out.
Before them was a headless, limbless clod: a human torso.
The men stared in utter surprise for a long moment. Fuller picked up the knife and pulled it open. The handle was decorated with hunting figures, and the blade looked like it had been newly cleaned and oiled. He snapped it shut, then slid the knife into his pocket for the evidence box. One of the other officers was clumsily using a walking stick to scrape the bark off the back of the torso. Get away, Fuller snapped, and then he leaned in for a closer look. There was a length of twine around the back, as if the torso had been trussed for roasting. Gently, he rolled it over to expose its front.
It had been hollowed out. Or, rather, it had been hollowed out and then filled again: the viscera were gone, and in their place another bloody hunk had been forced in, so tightly that the bared ribs were poking into it. It was the missing left thigh, jammed inside like clothing in an overpacked steamer trunk.
The coroner and his attending doctors made their way through the press of officers and peered more closely at the body parts. The marks of cutting on the body didn’t quite make sense. The separation of the collarbone from the sternum in cutting off the head actually showed some medical knowledge—heads were surprisingly difficult to cut off with finesse—but the cuts down towards the pelvis were rather poorly executed. They looked, in short, like the half-right job of a chemistry professor who was three decades out of his medical practice. A bit of an embarrassment, atop the scandal of it all. But, regrettable as it was that word was getting out of the arrest, at least the police had thus far managed to keep the very worst specifics away from the penny newspapers and their readers.
Tap. Tap.
A reporter for the Boston Herald stood at the laboratory window: Could he come in?
THE BLOCK around the Old State House was in an utter tumult. Here, up Washington and along State Street, the former seat of the old colony now lived under the clanking and ceaseless siege of Boston’s printers. The building from whose balcony the Declaration of Independence had been read now declaimed the merits of Oak Tooth Wash, Dr. Warren’s Sarsaparilla, and Whipple’s Daguerreotypes Taken by Steam. Along this block one could find the printing offices for the Daily Mail, the Herald, the Daily Atlas, the Daily Chronotype, and a dozen more dailies and weeklies besides, shoulder to shoulder with engravers, express delivery offices, at least five competing news depots, and advertising agencies, whose “drummers” made ceaseless rounds of the sturdy brick buildings along the block. But today, the crowds of readers and deliverymen were gathering to see the latest words emerge from one office: 7 State Street, the home of the Daily Bee.
The Bee was hardly the most respectable paper—the stodgy mercantile Daily Advertiser might have fancied itself in that role—and even among the cheap penny papers, it was not the most popular. That honor, such as it was, went to its scurrilous Democratic neighbor the Herald. Somehow, despite being an organ of the ruling local Republican Party, the Bee often found itself outsold two to one by the livelier Herald. Not today.
“Our office was thronged with people,” one reporter recounted, “who stood on tip-toe for the latest revelations.” Those seeing the headlines looked searchingly to others next to them, in disbelief. “Can it be true?” they blurted out.
The Bee’s connection to local government served it well that day; it was the first with the scoop on Webster’s arrest. Other papers, upon asking at the jailhouse and at city hall, had found the story stoutly denied. For the entire morning, the Bee had the jump on every other daily in Boston. The elated owners ran their presses at full steam, hurling out thirty-six hundred copies an hour and selling them as fast as they could pass them out the door.
It couldn’t last; for one thing, the Bee had a sister publication, Perley’s Pic-Nic, which they had to load in the type for that afternoon. The story then, inevitably, would pass to their rivals at the Herald. But by the time the last Bee rolled off the printing cylinders, its proprietors had cranked out about twenty thousand copies—quadruple their normal run. And even as the Pic-Nic went to press, Bee reporters were pumping jailers for more details about Webster’s strange breakdown after his arrest, generating copy that threatened to run through all the exclamation marks in the type trays.
“The sight of the water crazed him! He appeared wild, ghastly, filled with fear! He fairly writhed with torment!” the Bee reported breathlessly. “It was a sight to curdle the coldest blood, and fill the stoutest man with terror! Tragedies, with scenes like this in them, are often played, but rarely enacted!”
For those across the river who were not connected with the police or the family, the word arrived more slowly, and incredulously. “I nursed the baby as I listened,” wrote one Cambridge neighbor, “and felt the milk grow cold in my breast.” Harvard’s main campus was thrown into utter disbelief as students emerged from their Saturday morning classes. “The excitement, the melancholy, the aghastness of every body are indescribable,” wrote a campus librarian. “The Professors poh! at the mere supposition that he is guilty. . . . People cannot eat; they feel sick.”
Sauntering through it, happily unaware, was Henry Longfellow. He’d made it off-campus and partway into the city, on his way to a friend’s lecture to young women on Dante, before beholding the bewildering sight of massed crowds around the school and the newspaper offices. “The whole town,” he marveled, “is in the greatest excitement.” Soon he found out why. The news was simply baffling. That his old neighbor, the colleague he’d just had dinner with, could be accused of such a thing was unthinkable.
The Dante lecture did not go well. How could it? There was only one topic of discussion that day, and it was not to be the Purgatorio—not even for the respectable young ladies of Boston.
Turning to Longfellow after the lecture, Mrs. Farrar—an old friend, and a writer on women’s etiquette—could keep the matter in no longer, etiquette be damned. Had he heard, she asked, that Mr. Parkman’s thigh had been found? Or presumably it was Parkman’s thigh.
“Of course,” she added to Longfellow, scandalously, “nobody could identify that but his wife!”
It truly was quite appalling.
“All minds,” the poet lamented, “are soiled by this foul deed.”
But even as the young ladies left the lecture, there was a new rumor and a new tragedy, this one nearly as shocking as the first. Webster, it was said, had killed himself in jail.
IN THE dimly lit cell Dr. Clark stood up; there was nothing he could do for the prisoner now.
You’re fine, he reported.
John White Webster, who was indeed remarkably alive, had recovered enough from the shock of the previous evening that he was not only sitting up on his cot, he was complaining heartily about his case to his jailer, Gustavus Andrews.
“That is no more Dr. Parkman’s body than it is mine,” he groused. “How in the world it came to be there, I don’t know.”
Andrews maintained the usual droll reserve his job required around the prisoners. Perhaps he’d land a good souvenir from this one; back when he’d been a constable, his capture of a ring of counterfeiters had netted 660 fake quarters. After the state melted them for assaying—the metal proved worthless—he’d asked for them back as a keepsake. The massy chunk now sat in his office; he was considering casting it into a dinner bell for the prisoners.
Dr. Webster was still going on about the Medical College; he scarcely even needed prompting anymore.
“I never liked the looks of Littlefield,” he confided to his jailer. By his account, he’d warned the school against hiring the janitor in the first place—“I opposed his coming there all I could.”